Eddie Stobart Group

Enabled IT consolidation

Stobart Group is establishing itself as the UK's front runner in the rapidly developing multimodal freight, logistics, and warehousing sectors. The Group's multimodal offering consists of Stobart Ports, Stobart Air, and Stobart Rail Divisions. Stobart Group provides road, rail, sea, and inland waterway transport and logistics solutions to its wide variety of manufacturing, retail, and public-sector customers across the industrial, consumer, food, and defense sectors.

IN BRIEF

Industry

Logistics

Challenges

Consolidate several business units into a centralised IT model and develop a group IT strategy

Enable file collaboration amongst employees

Improve application performance over the WAN

Solution

14Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC)

Benefits

3x reduction in bandwidth utilisation

60% improvement in the time taken to download files

Eddie Stobart Group

Major UK logistics company deploys Riverbed Steelhead appliances to enable IT consolidation

Stobart Group is establishing itself as the UK’s front runner in the rapidly developing multimodal freight, logistics and warehousing sectors. The Group’s multimodal offering consists of Stobart Ports, Stobart Air and Stobart Rail Divisions. Stobart Group provides road, rail, sea and inland waterway transport and logistics solutions to its wide variety of manufacturing, retail and public-sector customers across the industrial, consumer, food and defence sectors.

Over the last few years the Group has evolved beyond its position as an independent road transport and logistics business to a leading UK provider of multimodal transport and logistics solutions. Today Stobart Group delivers outsourced transport and logistics solutions for a wide variety of manufacturing, retail and public-sector customers across the industrial, consumer, food and defence sectors; working in partnership to transform their supply chain structures and optimise their efficiency.

The company employs over 5,300 people and operates more than 1,850 tractor units and drawbars, 3,000 trailers and around 6 million square feet of high specification warehousing at sought after locations across the UK.

The Stobart Group had experienced quick expansion as a result of organic growth and acquisition. With six different businesses now part of the Stobart Group, the company needed to bring them altogether under one common infrastructure model, requiring a common platform for all employees, one desktop strategy and one group policy.

The strategy had previously focused on a decentralised IT model with site based servers for office based applications and local file storage. As a result of acquisition the company needed a new strategy and chose to implement a centralised IT model. This would bring about a number of benefits in terms of reduced costs, improved data backup procedures and increased business efficiencies.

But employees soon began to complain about slow download speeds and unacceptable delays in accessing files and data over the wide area network (WAN). They were struggling to collaborate on documents across the multiple UK sites and this was adversely affecting employee productivity.

Solution: Riverbed Steelhead appliances deliver improvements in one day

Stobart Group considered upgrading its bandwidth capacity but its IT provider suggested a WAN optimisation solution to overcome the issue of poor application performance. Stobart Group began to investigate further and decided to test products from three vendors; Cisco, Blue Coat and Riverbed.

Following an initial meeting with Riverbed the Stobart Group agreed to run an informal trial and Vince Sparks, IT director at Stobart Group explains, “We were sceptical about this new technology, but Riverbed gave one of the most reassuring presentations we had ever seen. The appeal was that the equipment was simple to deploy and manage and the company wanted a solution that could be installed quickly and easily at the branch offices.“ Following the meeting Sparks agreed to evaluate the Riverbed Steelhead appliances and set up a trial at three sites.

The first location was a small temporary branch office with a low level broadband connection that was being used to house the senior management team whilst the main head office was being extended. The second site held over 100 people with a 2Mpbs bandwidth link, which was running at 90% capacity most of the time. The third site was the data centre.

By the end of the first day of the trial, Stobart Group saw a 60% improvement in the time taken to download files and applications, and a 3x reduction in bandwidth utilisation from 90% to 30%. Files that used to take 50 minutes to download were now taking 50 seconds. Sparks notes, “We immediately saw the benefits to the extent that our users contacted our service desk to ask what the improvement had been. They wanted to know what we’d changed in the infrastructure because jobs that had taken them hours and minutes were now taking minutes and seconds.

The Riverbed appliance made it possible for the management team to work effectively from the temporary site, something that had been almost impossible before.” Stobart Group then carried out a series of formal tests over a two month period, and invited Riverbed, Blue Coat and Cisco to participate. Each vendor was asked to deploy appliances at the same three locations in order to make true comparisons.

The company used two measurement factors. First, the overall improvement to application performance over the WAN and user perception, and the second was ease of deployment and management. As Sparks recalls, “Following the success of the informal trial with Riverbed, the entire IT team was keen to see what would happen in the formal trials, but the other vendors just did not perform to the same level. We really needed ‘plug and play’ technology as we don’t have a large IT team and we really wanted a solution that would just deliver results for us. It became clear that there was a greater requirement for technical knowledge to implement and maintain the other vendors’ solution.”

At the sites where Riverbed appliances are installed, employee productivity has improved as users can now access files and applications in seconds, and collaborate on shared documents across the multiple UK sites. Stobart Group has also avoided a costly bandwidth upgrade, and as Sparks notes, “Prior to meeting with Riverbed, we thought that we could overcome the issue of poor application performance by increasing bandwidth.

As a result of the meeting we came to realise that the problem was one of latency, a common problem associated with windows file sharing applications, and that simply adding more bandwidth to our infrastructure would not have solved the issue of poor application performance.”

Stobart Group can now continue to roll out its centralised IT system and remove local servers. In doing so, the company is already beginning to benefit from the savings associated with reduced licensing and management costs, and in addition is seeing a benefit around data backups. Prior to installing Riverbed, backups were managed at the branch office layer, with an employee nominated to manage and change the data backups.

The IT team then had to check the backup logs to ensure that the tapes had been swapped correctly, generating more administrative work for them. As the company removes its local servers, the data will be stored centrally and can then be backed up over the WAN to a disaster recovery (DR) site, thus improving both the integrity and the security of the data, as well as increasing the efficiency of the IT department.

SUMMARY

Due to organic growth and acquisition the Stobart Group needed to amalgamate six disparate business groups into one organisation. This required a change of IT strategy and a move to a centralised IT system. During the consolidation process, users began to complain of slow application performance speeds when attempting to access files and documents over the WAN. The company considered a bandwidth upgrade but this was costly and would not have overcome the issue of file latency. Instead Stobart Group deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances across its organisation.

With Riverbed appliances deployed the Stobart Group is now able to continue with its IT consolidation project. Employee productivity has been increased as users can now access files and applications in minutes and seconds, instead of hours and minutes, and file sharing amongst employees has improved significantly. Stobart Group is also benefitting from the cost savings associated with the removal of local servers, and an improvement in file integrity and security as file backups can now be performed centrally.

“by installing Riverbed we’ve come to understand that the issue isn’t always the bandwidth, but actually one of latency.”

“The other vendors just did not perform to the same level. We really wanted a solution that would just deliver results for us.”

“We now know that latency is the main cause of poor application performance rather than not enough bandwidth, and thanks to Riverbed we were able to avoid spending thousands of pounds on upgrading network bandwidth.”

“Our users contacted our service desk to ask what the improvement had been because jobs that had taken hours and minutes were now taking minutes and seconds.”

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